The Illusion Of Improvement

So one more thought on Valencia.  I've seen a bunch of self-congratulatory blather in the media from a bunch of teams which normally don't feature in the points talking about how much they improved for this race.  The problem is that A) this race saw higher attrition than we normally would see, and B) the attrition was sharply biased towards the normal front of the grid, benefiting far more drivers than normal.

Consider that if Vettel and Grosjean's Renault engines not gone bang, your podium top three would have been Vettel- Alonso- Grosjean.  Pretend that Maldonaldo and Hamilton had kept their heads rather than running into each other, and suddenly Schumacher's impressive third becomes a less-impressive seventh -- still his best result of the season but less than we've expected. Webber plummets to eighth.  Many of the rest of the accidental points scorers get pushed back out into the cold.

So personally I'm not as impressed with the improvement these teams are claiming.

Yes, you have to be in the right place to profit from other people's problems, but so many of these places benefited from the abnormally high attrition rate that you can't seriously claim drastic improvement.

Now in the old days of F1 when the attrition rate was regularly higher, with fewer than 14 cars routinely running at the flag, seeing improvements was legitimate because you could count on the attrition rate continuing to be high.  Today, when usually we only loose one or two cars, and sometimes not even that, you can't count on cars ahead of you falling away.

(I'm not counting the absence of either Massa or Button as a contributing factor, since while in the long run it is, in the recent past it has unfortunately been business as usual for these two drivers.)

Recovery

Oh, man.  You had to like that, especially coming back from a disappointing qualifying -- although one that was a tactical error instead of a problem with the speed of the car.  Starting from 11th and making it to the front with really only one gift -- Vettel's alternator failure -- and then holding it.  Hamilton never really looked like getting on with the Ferrari once it had eased past.  Alonso put on a clinic for us on Sunday, and as a result, it is Ferrari Monday.

I've said before, you have to be near the front in order to capitalize on other people's misfortunes.


Quick notes from Sunday:

• Was I the only one who noticed that the Valencia podium featured the three former Ferrari world champions -- Alonso, Raikkonen, and Schumacher?  And a guy from Ferrari?
• Oh, and Schumacher's climb through the defenseless at the end of the race was great to watch -- and he was well placed to benefit from the bad luck of those up the road from him.
• Nice comment from Saturday: "Can you seriously contend that Massa is now rubbish if he's merely 8 hundredths behind Alonso?"
• The Renault alternator failures remind me of a story from the 80s, when the engines were much less reliable and failures were far more common.  After one session which featured an explosive on-track failure, a team put out a press release blaming the problem on an "electrical fault".  Deep background research confirmed that this was merely PR spin -- in that what had happened was that the crank shaft failed, jamming a cylinder through the engine block, knocking the alternator off.  Yeah, "electrical fault".
• In my opinion Senna got jobbed for the collision with Kobayashi -- being realistic it was a racing incident; if one was eager to apportion blame, one could argue that Kobayashi stuck his nose into a hole it was never going to fit in when Senna positioned for the next turn.  A cut tire was punishment enough -- the drive-through was insult to injury.
• In the same vein I don't think that the collision between Kobayashi and Massa was actionable, even though it put paid to Massa's afternoon.
• I also think the Maldonado-Hamilton incident was, at worst a racing incident.  The only reason why you could argue Maldonaldo had left the track prior to t-boning Hamilton was because Hamilton had pushed Maldonaldo off it.  Hamilton's punishment of the instant retirement was fitting.  Maldonaldo being awarded a after-the-fact drive-through penalty was more of the same jobbing.  Frankly if you put these high-speed cars into the concrete-lined gerbil maze that is Valencia, some of them are going to run into each other.
• I'm getting tired with the BBC blather pack -- after Alonso was in front, the commentary was all about how the Ferrari was going to eat its tires and have to stop again, leaving the way clear for Hamilton to take victory.  It was only after several laps of this that the commentators remembered that Alonso's tires were changed at the safety car -- the same point that Hamilton and Raikkonen's were -- and that the cars behind the leading three seemed unlikely to be able to catch up.  
• Although that did turn out to be wrong, as Maldonaldo caught up to the McLaren and probably would have had sufficient time to pass the McLaren had he not banged into it first.

European Progress?

It appears that if you combine A) restrictions in engine map usage with B) a low-downforce circuit, you end up with a situation where at least one of the Ferraris can run comfortably ahead of the McLarens, and with -- if not in front of -- the Red Bulls.

This race was always going to be a totally unique situation, what with the transition of regulations. Restricting the engine map usage a race before the off-throttle-blowing becomes illegal creates a single snapshot moment, one that is not really worth developing for.

It appears that Red Bull and Ferrari were well positioned for this race. The McLarens for whatever reason did not have the downforce needed to really run with the front cars. I am sure that McLaren will be better positioned in Silverstone, where the high-speed track is more likely to suit their cars. One can speculate that this may be more due to the Ferrari and Red Bull falling back into McLaren's clutches, as they have so far apparently avoided the performance loss due to engine mappings; one might speculate that this was more due to McLaren using the regulation to a better advantage than their rivals.

So all that verbiage aside, I fully expect that Silverstone will bring us the usual top three battling it out, albeit rather closer together than Valencia showed. There is a very small chance that Red Bull's performance advantage is completely due to the off-throttle blown diffusers, meaning that they will suffer disproportionally when the rules change -- but frankly I doubt it.

Update: Hamilton vs. Safety Car

F1.Fanatic has a post which includes video of Hamilton's safety car transgression. Worth watching. Seems as though Hamilton could have made it through if he had not hesitated -- the difference at the line is about a third of a car length. Not sure if Alonso would have also made it through had Hamilton not hesitated.

Rubber Side Down, Mark

So as much as Mark Webber's brief flirtation as a test pilot was hugely scary, there are actually some things we can take away from it.



Firstly and most importantly, Webber hopped out of the car right away. Even though the car came down on the roll bar assembly, Webber appeared to be shaken but otherwise unhurt by the accident. This alone is a huge endorsement for the work that the FIA and the teams have been doing to make the cars as safe as possible. Formula One racing will always be a dangerous sport, but the people in charge are trying to avoid it being unnecessarily dangerous. We can only hope that this won't shake his confidence the next time he steps into a car.

But secondly. While the safety car was droning around, Martin Brundle treated us to a lot of blather about how the problem was the huge closing speeds and the increased closing speeds are what makes incidents like that so dangers. He carried on by saying something to the effect that next year's movable wing idea is only going to aggravate the situation and that the people in charge will have to think very hard about this.

The problem with this logic is that it is totally divorced from what Formula One has become today. Today you can have a car that is demonstrably one or two entire seconds per lap faster than the car it is stuck behind. If you combine this with the current fasion of gerbil-maze courses that don't give the cars behind any reasonable chance to close up with the car in front, you are going to be in a situation where the only way a pass is going to get made is if the car behind is much faster than the car in front.

Fiddling with tenths here and there, which is what the movable-wing proposal is doing, isn't going to get it done.

We have seen on occasion brilliant racing this year. The most spectacular so far has to be Montreal, where the tires were so bad that the drivers were skating around on them. Now I'm sure that Bridgestone isn't keen on being the source of so much griping, but it does show that Frank Dernie was on to something last winter.

But the bottom line is that F1 has to look in the mirror and decide what it really wants. Tricky, aero-addicted high-traction cars on meandering road circuits isn't making for a formula that encourages passing. And if F1 really wants passing, something fundamental is going to have to change.

Hamilton Skates Again

So once again Valencia managed to produce more in controversy than outright racing. Although I will say that someone has been working very hard on either the track or the TV cameras -- there appeared to be acres of space available on the track, a far cry from the gerbil maze of the first year.

Lewis Hamilton continued his charmed 2010 career, bobbling the Safety Car transition. Ferrari is predictably incensed, although in retrospect the only difference Hamilton's behavour would have made would be his leading Alonso home in 9th place instead. Ferrari had extremely poor luck with this Safety Car, as drivers ahead could continue at racing speeds while Ferrari tooled around behind it, and drivers behind managed to pit before getting caught up in the train.

Even the penalties which were liberally handed out after the fact were a whopping five second each and had little practical effect on the result. Even though Hamilton's drive through had a total of zero effect on the running order due to the stewards' waiting so long to assign a penalty and the Sauber holding up the rest of the pack, one can make a compelling argument that the drive-through time penalty meant Hamilton was in fact penalized the most strongly for the Safety Car transgressions. While the stewards had a lot of things to think about, they clearly didn't trouble themselves too much about any of it.

That's racing. Ferrari drew the bad luck this time. Get over it.

Lucky?

It probably doesn't feel like it, but Alonso got lucky on Sunday. This picture shows the damage done to his rear left wheel in the collision with Petrov's Renault in the closing stages; Alonso is fortunate that neither the rim nor the tire failed.



Alonso got a lot of press for calling out Ferrari's seemingly glacial pace of car development this year. The car clearly isn't on terms with the Red Bull or McLaren cars, but behind that it is hard to tell. Massa was right there with Rosberg's Mercedes all day, and the Mercedes acted as a road-block for many cars following it for much of the race. Alonso puts the Ferrari on par with Renault. I personally think that the Renault is currently faster, but that mish-mash of cars in the Mercedes-Ferrari-Renault list makes it hard to tell for certain who is where.

Ferrari appears to be pinning hopes on a upgrade for Valencia, although the gerbil-maze nature of that event won't really showcase upgrades much, and we'd have to wait a few weeks before getting on to more traditional circuits.

Valencia: Year Two and F1 2010

This is the second year that Formula 1 has raced at Valenica.

Last year I described the race course as a cement-walled gerbil run. The TV lines were so bad that most of the time we only got a single car in the shot, leading to the illusion that the cars were running on their own the whole time. The fact that we were more interested in pit-lane violations and fancy lights verses of a lollipop instead of actual racing speaks volumes about both the state of Formula One in general and Valencia in particular.

This year they moved the walls back, which helps a lot from the TV show perspective. Without the cars being walled in so tightly we can see more of them and you can watch cars following each other more closely than last year. However from a racing perspective it was still pretty dry.

Next year there will be no more refueling. Instead of pit-lane and fuel-load strategy, the cars will have to challenge for position, and make passes, on the track.

The problem I have with this is that as currently written, I don't believe that these regulations will lead to any improvement in the racing. If anything, the show next year stands to be even more boring than this year.

Why?

Because I don't think the technical rules will actually make passing any easier.

I had such high hopes for 2009. I was positively salivating after the Australian Grand Prix, which featured Vettel tangling with Kubica in the closing stages of the race. The event had featured closer racing for position up and down the field, too. The fact that it ended in tears for Vettel didn't do much to discourage me, and left me hoping that this would be a sign of things to come.

Yet it hasn't panned out that way. This year, as in previous years, the majority of on-track, non-contact position changes have happened on the first lap. Beyond that it is usually pit lane strategy that changes the running order.

Try running Valencia from this year without the refueling. What would have been different? Well, the McLaren cars wouldn't have had to stop; Kovalainen could have parked his car on the racing line and let Hamilton draw out an untouchable lead. Neither Barichello nor Raikkonen would have been able to move up. We would have snoozed through the procession race, and woken up to a one-two McLaren finish.

And that's the problem I have with the regulations for 2010. Yes, we'll no longer have to worry about fuel loads, as the order will be more or less set from the first lap. But since the cars can't run closely enough together to make passing a real possibility, I think in the end it will be more boring next year.

Even more so at gerbil runs like Monaco and Valencia.